Is Apollo a Salmon?

Thu, 10 May 2007 12:20:27 GMT

Wired magazine, issue 15.04, had an article titled "Desktop, R.I.P." which included this quote:

Apps once came in shrink-wrapped boxes and ran on a local operating system; today they live increasingly on the Internet, where they run in a Web browser for a monthly fee — or for no charge at all.

Now, even accounting for hype that accompanies Wired articles, its clear that the river of applications is flowing fast downstream from the desktop to the browser. Is Apollo a salmon going upstream?

I do not expect Apollo to replace web applications, the advantages of the later are just too huge for that to happen, but at work we have been discussing how we will look to use Apollo to compliment our existing web applications. Why might we use Apollo?

Some of our users spend hours working with our web application. Spending that long working in a browser is not always fun, I used to run both Yahoo Mail Beta and GMail all day long in a browser but eventually it would crash normally because the browser was running near capacity and I went to some other site that had an error.
Closer interaction with a users file system. This could be a big plus for us when syncing files.
Cross platform compatibility. Without this I don't think we would even consider Apollo. A couple years ago Southwest introduced Ding which is a piece of software that you download and it then notifies you, by dinging!, of special fares. As is often the case the Windows version was first and then a considerable time later the Mac version came out. With Apollo both versions would come out at the same time.

There will be plenty of bad uses of Apollo, just like with any technology, but there is incredible potential. Web applications are a staple like milk or bread while Apollo could be a salmon. And like salmon only good when served in the right way; a salmon lox bagel, sashimi or grilled.

The First Post

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:59:53 GMT

The first post. I've decided to start a blog primarily because I like writing. And having been a programmer for the last 10 years I haven't written much during that time. I also realize I like writing about technical issues and have a fair amount on my mind at the moment so it seems like a good time to start a blog. Note, I did not say I was a grammatically correct writer. So, expect the odd typo and grammatically incorrect sentence from time to time. This is a blog and I'm not going to use the grammar corrector in Word before posting.

I am also intrigued by social networking so InstantSpot seemed a good spot (pun intended) to start my blog.

I aim to cover a bunch of topics, some tutorials and explanations of basic ColdFusion functionality, thoughts on the future of the web and ColdFusion, conferences, and anything else that comes up. I will mostly be focusing on ColdFusion (and will probably start using cf as an abbreviation real soon) though I do hope to post on other non-cf topics like JavaScript, MySQL and databases in general and who knows what else in the future.

I am not going to aim to publish on a regular basis and have pledged to keep this blog a purely non-work time activity. I'm busy enough there anyway. Good busy. I also don't believe blogs die. So if I have nothing good or interesting to say I will say nothing. I also don't think this will turn into a news blog with short entries and links to the latest news. There are enough of those, and, I rely on them for my tech-news as much as anywhere else. In short, if you like what you are reading I suggest using the RSS feeds or subscribing over email.

More to come...

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Is Apollo a Salmon?

The First Post